With around a third of industrial heritage sites re-opening in July and more in August it’s a good time to highlight the National Museum Directors’ Council (NMDC) guidelines on re-opening museums. These have been compiled with support from DCMS and the Museums and Galleries Working Group. The guidelines are intended to help employers, employees, and the self-employed, and volunteers in the museum sector in England in understanding how to work safely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The guidelines provide a set of practical considerations for museums to work through before reopening, which should be used in conjunction with COVID-safe guidelines published by HM Government. These are intended to enhance, not supplant, existing regulations and to sit alongside and inform the existing business practices and standards museums already consider when managing risk and conducting business planning activities.
The intention is to periodically update these as and when new Government guidance becomes available during the different steps of adjustment to lockdown. To download the guidelines follow this link:
NMDC has also produced a timeline of possible stages of reopening, since there will be no single date on which all museums reopen. Rather, there is a range of different approaches depending on the individual museum. The timeline can be found here:
https://www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/coronavirus-update/possible-timeline-museum-reopening/
Industrial Heritage Networks 